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NIFTi is about human-robot cooperation. About teams of robots and humans doing tasks together, interacting together to try and reach a shared goal. NIFTi looks at how the robot could bear the human in mind. Literally. When determining what to do or say next in human-robot interaction; when, and how. NIFTi puts the human factor into cognitive robots, and human-robot team interaction in particular.
Each year, NIFTi evaluates its systems together with several USAR organizations. Rescue personnel teams up with NIFTi robots to carry out realistic missions, in real-life training areas.

Results

During Year 1, NIFTi developed the basis for human-robot collaboration in USAR environments. Together with end-users we defined use cases and requirements for robot platforms to be deployed. S&T development was set in the context of human-instructed exploration of an USAR disaster site. We made progress on all four project objectives: functional environment modeling, situated cognitive user modeling, adaptive interaction, and planning/execution with adaptive morphology.

NIFTi investigates what it takes to make a robot a good team-player. What should it try to do, say, see, and how to do all that, so that it can best support its human team members under varying circumstances? In Year 2, we continued R&D towards more-autonomous-and-more-collaborative team-player-robots: We moved to a full human-robot team setup, within the setting of the tunnel accident use case.

In Year 3, NIFTi moved to full 3D environment models, fusing laser data and camera input. These 3D models are integrated in the multi- modal user interfaces, and are used by the UGV to perform 3D navigation. The human-robot team now includes an in-field rescuer, making stand-off observations of a Train Accident disaster site (new use case) and posting information back to the remote command post.
As in previous years, NIFTi performed extensive field experiments, studies, and end user evaluations. Also, NIFTi deployed a human-robot team including multiple UGVs and UAVs to aid the Vigili del Fuoco in structure damage assessment in the Emilia-Romagna region (Northern Italy), after the region had been hit by multiple earthquakes mid-2012. During that mission NIFTi successfully explored several buildings in Mirandola.